About Me

I received my MA in philosophy of science many years ago and currently reviving my academic interests. I hope to stimulate individuals in the realms of science, philosophy and the arts...to provide as much free information as possible.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Andrew Sessler, a former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, died April 17 of cancer. He was 85.

Known as one of the most influential accelerator physicists in the history of the field to his friends and colleagues, Sessler joined the lab in 1959 and eventually became director in 1973. As director, he expanded the Berkeley lab to its largest size at the time and focused its attention toward the environment, establishing the lab’s Energy and Environment Division, or what is now the Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

“He was an outstanding scientist and a superb human being,” said Morris Pripstein, guest senior scientist at the Berkeley lab and Sessler’s colleague. “I would refer to him as a ‘mensch,’ which in the Jewish lexicon is the highest praise one can bestow on a person.”

Sessler was born on Dec. 11, 1928, and grew up in New York City. As an undergraduate, he studied math at Harvard University and he later obtained his doctorate in physics from Columbia University. Sessler began work at the Berkeley lab after serving as a professor at Ohio State University for five years.

While expanding the Berkeley lab, Sessler also made sure the lab focused more on the environment than just physics. Other than forming the Energy and Environment Division, he also worked on developing accelerators — devices that collide particles for scientists to study the structure of matter.

“Andy Sessler changed the face and character of our laboratory,” said Paul Alivisatos, current director of the lab, in a statement. “He successfully made the case for science to aid our country during its first energy crisis.”According to Arthur Rosenfeld, professor emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley, Sessler’s great legacy in physics was his expertise in accelerator design, particularly medical accelerators, which helped treat several kinds of cancer by generating X-rays for purposes in radiation therapy.

In addition to making key contributions to physics and accelerator science, Sessler was a devoted humanitarian.

In 1978, Sessler and several other UC Berkeley physicists founded a group in response to the arrests of physicist Yuri Orlov and Israeli politician Natan Sharansky by Soviet authorities. The group publicly encouraged Soviets to cease the oppression of members of the scientific community. According to Pripstein, a co-founder of the group, Sessler played a “profound role” in the group, which eventually mushroomed into an international organization involving more than 10,000 scientists from 44 countries.

Kwang-Je Kim, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a colleague of Sessler early in his career at the Berkeley lab, recalled moments outside of work when they enjoyed the outdoors together, such as jogging during lunch breaks and backpacking in the Sierra Nevada.

"A Psychedelic Anti-Drug Film From 1971 That Made Drugs Look Pretty Fun"

by

Rebecca Onion

Slate

In this film made by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1971 and meant for use with 8- to 10-year-old students, Alice takes a psychedelic trip through an animated Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll’s story was a staple of drug culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Trying to speak to a young audience, people making anti-drug propaganda repurposed the tale to their own ends.

In a famous example, Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit”—a celebration of the mind-bending properties of “feeding your head”—was the inspiration for the “anonymous” book Go Ask Alice. This narrative, written in journal form, depicted the downward slide of a supposedly “real” teenage girl who goes from straight-laced goody-two-shoes to drug casualty in record time. Go Ask Alice came out in March 1971—the same year that this movie was produced.

In the beginning of this film, Alice falls into a room full of cigarette machines, medicine cabinets, marijuana leaves, and bongs. She soon has a series of disturbing encounters.

Alice comes upon the Mock Turtle smoking marijuana from a hookah; the King of Hearts, who offers her heroin; and the March Hare, a tweaker who beats his foot on the ground constantly: “You oughta have some pep pills! Uppers! Amphetamines! Speed! You feel super good.”

The Alice character is meant to be the voice of reason, lecturing the creatures: “You live in this beautiful place. It could be wonderland! And all you do is … take drugs!” But the swirling animation is so fun, it’s hard to believe that a young viewer would pay her arguments any mind.

Indeed, the National Archives’ blog Media Matters tracked down a review of the film in a 1972 publication of the National Coordinating Council on Drug Education. The NCCDE wrote that “Curious Alice” was of dubious value in the classroom, noting that viewers “may be intrigued by the fantasy world of drugs” after watching it.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

When Sabrina (above) needed a poodle skirt for an upcoming sock hop dance, her parents (and fellow Whovians), Denise and James, decided to surprise her with a twist on the classic, wide-swing attire.

"We found an image of K-9 on the internet that we thought would be pretty easy to recreate and cut out," James tells io9. "I redrew it to the size we needed, and Denise did all the hard work."

James says the dress is primarily for Sabrina's dance, but that it's sure to see some use at their local con next year. "Sabrina LOVES Doctor Who," he says. "Matt Smith is her favorite, but she's kind of digging the classics, as well."

Humanity has the knowledge to solve its problems but lacks the moral insight to implement these ideas on a global scale. New moral insight can be obtained through transformative experiences that allow us to examine and refine our underlying preferences, and the eventual landing of humans on Mars will be of tremendous transformative value. Before such an event, I propose that we liberate Mars from any controlling interests of Earth and allow Martian settlements to develop into a second independent instance of human civilization. Such a designation is consistent with the Outer Space Treaty and allows Mars to serve as a test bed and point of comparisonby which to learn new information about the phenomenon of civilization. Rather than develop Mars through a series of government and corporate colonies, let us steer the future by liberating Mars and embracing the concept of planetary citizenship.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Cosmology is the attempt to understand in scientific terms the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. This ambition has been with us since the ancient Greeks, even if the developments in modern cosmology have provided a picture of the universe dramatically different from that of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. The cosmological thinking of these figures, e.g. the belief in uniform circular motion of the heavens, was closely related to their philosophical ideas, and it shaped the field of cosmology at least up to the times of Copernicus and Kepler.

Nowadays it is not uncommon among scientists to question the relevance of philosophy for their field. This may be part of a simplified view according to which science is mostly about finding the best match between theories and empirical data. However, even on such a view one can identify interesting philosophical issues, like underdetermination of theories and theory ladenness of data. Moreover, apart from matching theory and data, science is often concerned with what the studied theories implies for our deeper understanding of the world. This involves the philosophical activity of interpreting the theories in question, and philosophy thus continues to be an integral part of scientific, including cosmological, thought. One may argue that cosmology is even more philosophical than most other sciences, in that it more explicitly deals with the limits or horizons of scientific knowledge. In particular, as cosmology involves the age-old questions of the possible temporal and spatial limits of the universe, it is naturally associated with irresistible speculations of what may cause or lie beyond those limits.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

The conservative author believes that women have contributed little to major philosophical traditions because men are better abstract thinkers.

by

Noah Berlatsky

April 17th, 2014

The Atlantic

"No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions." So said the author Charles Murray in a 2005 essay titled "The Inequality Taboo," in which he argued that men are better at abstract thinking than women are. In a recent talk at the University of Austin, timed to promote his new book The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, a student asked Murray if he stood by this claim. As Amanda Marcotte notes in a piece at Slate, Murray began with condescension (“tell me who you had in mind”), and then added, "Until somebody gives me evidence to the contrary, yeah, I'll stick with that statement."

There are a couple of ways to respond to Murray's claim that women have made no significant original contributions to philosophy. You could, first of all, produce a list of female philosophers. Marcotte takes this path, mentioning names like Hannah Arendt and Elizabeth Anscombe. The problem though, as Marcotte says, is that:

If you know how the game is played, you'll know that if you start listing philosophers, Murray or any of his defenders will just muse about whether their work is wholly "original," since said women likely have read other philosophers—most of whom are male by virtue of women being squeezed out of educational opportunities and platforms to express their thoughts throughout most of history.

Rather than just throwing names around, then, it seems like it might be more useful to address Murray's question about philosophy more philosophically. When Murray says he is looking for "significant original thinker[s] in the world's great philosophical traditions," what does that mean? What intellectual preconceptions is he operating under? What isn't spoken when he speaks?

Feminist thinkers have actually spent a lot of time philosophizing about women's inclusion and exclusion from lists of most important this or that, especially in the context of literary canons. Murray is willing to acknowledge that there have been important women writers, (since he believes literary thought is less abstract than philosophical thought) but he glosses over the fact that the literary canon, too, is tilted very male. In the Modern Library's list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century, for example, the top 14 are all by men (Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is 15.)

What accounts for this? In How To Suppress Women's Writing (1983) science-fiction author Joanna Russ looked at this imbalance and argued that when women are not included in the canon, the problem is not with the women. Instead, she said, "A mode of understanding literature which can ignore the private lives of half the human race is not 'incomplete': It is distorted through and through." She adds that the statement, "This is a good novel," begs the questions, "Good for what? Good for whom?"

Russ' point is that the claim of universal value—or, in Murray's terms, of abstract thought—is duplicitous. It assumes a culture and an intellectual frame in which there is no power differential; in which everyone is the same as everyone else, and in which you can speak from nowhere to everyone. But that “view from nowhere” does not exist (as many important philosophers, from Derrida to Foucault to Irigaray, have pointed out.) To say that all the best books are by men therefore says as much about the interest, and the relationship to power, of the list as it does about the books selected. It means, among other things, that experience coded as male (of manly old men catching fish, for example, or of lusting after young girls named Lolita) is more important than experience coded as female. "When we all live in the same culture," Russ says, "then it will be time for one literature." But we don't, and it isn’t.

Again, most feminist discussions of canon have focused on literature. But some have expanded the argument to philosophy—at least implicitly. In her groundbreaking book Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins argues that there is an important intellectual tradition among black women, but that this tradition is often ignored or erased because of the ways in which black women have been prevented from entering academic institutions—or even from attaining literacy. To uncover the intellectual tradition of black women, therefore, you have to look not just to philosophical tomes and the pronouncements of tenured pronouncers like Charles Murray, but to oral accounts, blues lyrics, and other marginal spaces. In this context, Collins highlights Sojourner Truth's famous "Ain't I a woman" speech:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Truth here is thinking through, and challenging, ideas about masculinity and femininity—or as Collins says, "Rather than accepting the existing assumptions about what a woman is and then trying to prove that she fit the standards, Truth challenged the very standards themselves." Are Truth's comments more or less original than Nietzsche's paranoid, misogynist assertion that "Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the "powerful", the "strong", the men?" Of the two, whose take on masculinity and femininity is more subtle, more nuanced, more surprising? For that matter, whose views have been more influential (among what groups?) on that much-brooded philosophical question, "What is woman?" and its supposedly more universal correlate, "What is man?"

Murray's statements about women and about philosophy are based on a slew of preconceptions—about what philosophy is, about which intellectual traditions are significant (not feminism for him, apparently), about which communities get to define "philosophy," and about what influence is considered consequential. When he says that there have been no significant female contributors to philosophy, he thinks he has made a statement about women. But in fact, he is telling us about philosophy—or about his particular, limited view of it. The real question shouldn't be "can woman do philosophy?" but rather "can philosophy make itself worthy of women like Sojourner Truth, Patricia Hill Collins, and Joanna Russ?" Is there a philosophy that can speak thoughtfully about equality, about injustice, and about women? Or does philosophy only exist in the cramped, querulous skulls of white men like Charles Murray, where it can celebrate its own insularity as originality, and its myopia as far-looking genius.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Houbolt's efforts convinced the space agency to focus on landing a module carrying a crew from lunar orbit rather than a rocket from Earth.

April 21st, 2014

latimes.com

John C. Houbolt, an engineer whose contributions to the U.S. space program were vital to NASA's successful moon landing in 1969, has died. He was 95.

Houbolt died April 15 at a nursing home in Scarborough, Maine, of complications from Parkinson's disease, said his son-in-law, Tucker Withington of Plymouth, Mass.

As NASA describes on its website, while under pressure during the U.S.-Soviet space race, Houbolt was the catalyst in securing U.S. commitment to the science and engineering theory that eventually carried the Apollo crew to the moon and back safely.

His efforts in the early 1960s are largely credited with convincing NASA to focus on the launch of a module carrying a crew from lunar orbit, rather than a rocket from Earth or other method.

Houbolt argued that a lunar orbit rendezvous, or LOR, would not only be less mechanically and financially onerous than building a huge rocket to take man to the moon or launching a craft while orbiting the Earth, but LOR was the only option to meet President Kennedy's challenge to reach the moon before the end of the decade.

NASA describes "the bold step of skipping proper channels" that Houbolt took by pushing the issue in a private letter in 1961 to an incoming administrator.

"Do we want to go to the moon or not?" Houbolt asks. "Why is a much less grandiose scheme involving rendezvous ostracized or put on the defensive? I fully realize that contacting you in this manner is somewhat unorthodox, but the issues at stake are crucial enough to us all that an unusual course is warranted."

Houbolt started his career with NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in Hampton, Va., in 1942. He left in 1963 to work for an aeronautical research and consulting firm in Princeton, N.J., then returned to NASA in 1976 as chief aeronautical scientist at Langley Field Center in Virginia. He retired in 1985 but continued private consulting work.

Born April 10, 1919, in Altoona, Iowa, Houbolt grew up in Joliet, Ill., and earned degrees in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich in 1957.

Charles Dodgson, the author and mathematician better known as Lewis Carroll, wrote about a young girl lost in surreal dreamscapes. But Dodgson had trouble navigating treacherous landscape of his own: literary fame.

The author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass wrote in 1891 letter to one Mrs. Symonds, explaining his particular discomfort with his fame:

I don't think I explained successfully my reasons for disliking letters of mine being put into autograph-collections. All that sort of publicity leads to strangers hearing of my real name in connection with the books, and to my being pointed out to, and started at by, strangers, and treated as a 'lion.' And I hate all that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish I had never written any books at all.

The letter was recently sold through Bonhams at auction for £11,875 by the University of Southern California, meaning the anti-fame missive has landed in a place very much obsessed with fame: Los Angeles.

"Fame-Hating Lewis Carroll Letter Lands in Los Angeles"

by

Jennifer Schuessler

April 17th, 2014

The New York Times

A letter by Lewis Carroll declaring his hatred for fame and sometime wish that he had never written “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” has now found a home in the epicenter of the global celebrity hellscape: Los Angeles.

The University of Southern California announced that it is the new owner of the letter, which was purchased anonymously at the London auction house Bonhams in March for $19,800, several times the estimate.

In the three-page letter, written to his friend Anne Symonds in 1891, Carroll (whose real name was Charles Dodgson) railed against collectors of his autograph letters. “All of that sort of publicity leads to strangers hearing of my real name in connection with the books, and to my being pointed out to and stared at by strangers and being treated as a ‘lion,’”he wrote.“And I hate all of that so intensely that sometimes I almost wish I had never written any books at all.”

In a statement, Abby Saunders, the curator of the university’s collection of more than 3,000 books, pamphlets, games and other items relating to Carroll, acknowledged the dry humor that could be made of the new acquisition.“Here in Los Angeles, where celebrity culture goes hand in hand with the film industry,”she said,“Carroll’s thoughts on fame are especially poignant.”

In my life nothing good has ever come of the “What do you do?” question. Once off my lips, the line “I work on moral philosophy, on ethics,” can lead in only one of two directions. Either my acquaintance, unschooled in philosophy, will be almost preternaturally interested in what I have to say – as if she’s happened upon some sublime creature only thought to exist on blanched parchment – or she’ll be absolutely dumbstruck by the stupidity of a life well wasted. Although it could go either way, let’s suppose she’s alighted on the latter path. “Philosophy… It doesn’t get you anywhere,” she replies, reveling in a truth that she believes is as certain as the claim that night follows day. And I’ve yet to come up with a truly satisfying rejoinder, probably because there’s no such thing. Try a joke, you think? “Oh, I don’t know, it certainly gets you into debt.” Or a plea for clarification? “I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘get you anywhere’.”

The truth is that neither response will do. For if my conversational partner already thinks philosophy a waste of time, perhaps through having a mistaken conception of philosophy, then she probably (as my former English landlady was fond of saying) “can’t be bothered” to listen to a full rebuttal, and she won’t brook a sharp counterexample either. Like so many others, she’s already made up her mind – or, better put, her mind has already been made up for her.

To do philosophy in the public sphere today is to be immediately put on the defensive, and in most cases, to stand in the wrong. And yet, how we got to this point where philosophy has been put on all fours – either fetishized as being beyond the real world or vilified for playing no part in it – still needs to be explained. A first modest step would be to get straight in our minds how many lay people conceive of philosophy, and why this (mis)conception should matter to those of us who believe, somewhat antiquely, in the life of the mind.

One place to begin is with my interlocutor’s saying that when philosophers discuss something, they never get anywhere. She could mean one of three things by this: first, that philosophers get mired in endless debate, never yielding anything in the way of concrete resolution; or second, that they continually make something out of nothing, causing all parties involved to be brought to a state of mental confusion due to the endless jostling over definitions and the petty squabbling over overnice distinctions; or third, that in the game of philosophy there’s no way to resolve who’s right and who’s wrong. These three doubts, collectively or individually, present considerable challenges to philosophy’s basic self-conception. The first doubt would have it that there can be no authoritative conclusions drawn from a set of competing claims; the second that no mental tranquility can be gained; and the third that there can be no certain judgments concerning winners and losers in the truth game.

Rather than respond to each of the doubts in turn, it occurs to me that it would be wiser to ask what assumptions lie behind my interlocutor’s worries. I suspect that she deeply feels the culturally-widespread loss of faith in the power of reason to help us understand ourselves and our world. She needn’t be a relativist or a deep skeptic to believe this. She may simply believe, for instance, that some combination of emotions, instincts, past experiences, hunches, friends’ advice and expectations, is better than reason at determining how we should act. Against this attitude the philosopher’s belief that reason has its own power to help (as well as its own inherent limitations) requires a profound attitudinal shift: humility must be cultivated where there was once impatience. The light of reason can only shine after we’ve discovered how to quiet our minds and distance ourselves from our ‘empirical selves’ – the chaos of our everyday experience. There’s a long education – an itinerary of sorts – which ultimately leads to this state of mind: a path that the uninitiated hasn’t known or hasn’t taken, and in consequence, can’t find value in.

My interlocutor might concede that if philosophy has any value, it’s philosophy in the sense that everyone has their own personal philosophy. A personal philosophy, she might suggest, is a fundamental set of beliefs that one lives by. Think of a book subtitle like ‘The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women’. In this sense of the word, we’d be justified in saying that a coach has her own coaching philosophy, a company its corporate philosophy, a party its governing philosophy, etc.

I’m not so sure that the notion of personal philosophy gets us very far in vindicating philosophy per se, for three reasons. One is that it’s not clear to me how far anyone espousing a personal philosophy is really committed to that set of beliefs. How do we know that he lives his life so that it lines up with his own ‘philosophy’, or that when the sea looks stormy, he won’t jump ship? How far his beliefs line up with his actions has yet to be demonstrated. Another reason is that we would need to know whether his personal philosophy is worth standing by. Merely saying “This I believe!” can’t be the end point of any probing inquiry, but must instead be a starting point. And the last reason, already more than hinted at, is that, whatever it is, philosophy must be more than a doctrine, it must be a certain style of thought – a way of examining one’s life with the goal of determining whether the life I’m leading amounts to anything good, for example. But when someone expresses their personal philosophy, the question of why it’s a good thing to have a personal philosophy still remains unasked, as if it were enough just to have one. So personal philosophies are frequently unphilosophical in nature.

“All right. But if you’re going to dismiss talk of personal philosophy as hopelessly ‘unphilosophical’, you’ll have to come round to agreeing with me that philosophy is otherwise useless,” my non-philosophical friend might (philosophically) argue. “After all, the philosophy you’re talking about has no bearing on the real world. It’s mostly an academic pursuit full of puzzles, word games, and the kind of thing that’s done in universities. It’s up in the clouds, not down-to-earth, and nowhere else useful, either.”

“You’re right, contemporary professional philosophy has, in general, become unhinged from the concerns common to all of us,” I might reply. “And, yes, the worst of it has degenerated into logical puzzles and the search for ingenious counterexamples and knock-down arguments to theories no-one else is interested in. But, beyond these worries, I can hear in your voice the most potent criticism – that philosophy is worthless on the grounds that acting is more important than thinking. ‘Getting things done,’ you imply, should be ranked much higher than ‘pie-in-the-sky reasoning’.”

Suppose for a moment that my interlocutor is right. But then, aren’t there times when we don’t know how to act – as well as times when we’re completely at a loss concerning how to go on, or how we got to where we are – a place where we’d prefer not to be? Times when we’re in a crisis over which we seem to have no control? Times when our lives no longer seem to make any sense? At such times, wouldn’t it be wise for us to try to think our way through the situation, in order to come to some more complete understanding of ourselves and of our place in the order of things? It’s at such tragic moments that the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s questions concerning what we care most about and what (and who) is worthy of our care might ring in our ears. At its best, philosophy asks us to be meticulously honest with ourselves. It impels us to look closely at the hand we’ve been dealt, to determine the extent to which we’ve helped or harmed others, to figure out what ultimately matters to us, and to assess how we’ve lived, in the most fundamental terms we can understand.

Were my questioner then to ask, “Why philosophy now?” my reply would be that we’re living through a historical period marked by great change. The institutions that make up the modern world – education and medicine, family and religion, home and work, among others – as well as the spheres of influence that define our existence – the economy, civil society, the state – are changing dramatically, resulting in new experiments in living being tried out. Some will get replicated and others will be ruled out. Insofar as our time has raised fundamental questions about the nature of our existence (what, for instance, is work? What is meaningful work? What is family? What is justice?), philosophy has returned in the form of a life-need – an activity that, although not fully understood, nor resounding with authority in the public imagination, is more than ever of vital importance. And yet philosophy is vital only if its conclusions are embodied, lived out in practice – that is to say, only so long as they’re taken in, sat with, mulled over, and integrated into our being. In this light, what people should find attractive about the philosophical life is a vision of an integrated soul – a person whose fundamental cares and concerns are integrated into a meaningful whole.

And if, at this late stage, she were to scoff at this seeming self-importance, I might offer the thought that one of the things I’ve learned is not to take myself too seriously. Jane Austen taught me that, along with my myriad failures. Other things I’m still learning include the art of speaking truthfully without bullying or boring; that of being honest without baring all to all; of being accurate without being self-righteous: also, how to be grateful when corrected, open-minded while committed, and, above all, how to love the small things, the grace of them all, and, not least, the sheer fact of my existence.

Reason, it turns out, is neither omnipotent nor impotent in matters of the head and heart. Philosophical wisdom is neither so rare as to be entirely extinct from the world we inhabit, nor so common as to be easily purchasable in the marketplace. Yet thanks to a mature recognition that things aren’t as they ought to be, philosophical self-examination will continue to have a reason for being, because it promises to ultimately bring us peace of mind about the things that matter most.

Philosophy was the first academic field; the founder of the Academy was Plato. Nevertheless, philosophy’s place in academe can stir up controversy. The ancient lineage itself provokes dissension. Philosophy’s lack of progress over the past 2,500 years is accepted as a truism, trumpeted not only by naysayers but even by some of its most enthusiastic yea-sayers. But the truism isn’t true. Both camps mistake the nature of philosophy and so are blind to its progress. Let’s consider the yea-sayers first.

The structure of universities demands that a field be designated as a science, a social science, or one of the humanities. This structure has ill served philosophy. It’s not a science, and it’s not a social science. Therefore it belongs, by default, to the humanities, rubbing shoulders with English literature and art history. And what are the humanities? They are premised, according to one cultural critic, Leon Wieseltier, who is among the most impassioned contemporary defenders of the humanities, on "the irreducible reality of inwardness" and are, in fact, "the study of the many expressions of that inwardness." (Wieseltier’s words were written in response to an essay by my husband, Steven Pinker.)

This definition of the humanities is arguably apposite for the study of art and literature, but most philosophers would reject it, starting with Plato himself. In fact, it sounds like a course-catalog description of the shadow studies in which the prisoners of Plato’s cave are involuntarily enrolled. The man who banished the poets from his utopia would hardly acquiesce in a view of philosophy that rendered it a species of literature. If the arguments of Plato and Descartes, Spinoza and Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein yield us nothing but expressions of our irreducible inwardness, then we can judge them only on aesthetic grounds, as we do Sophocles and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Some philosophers might agree to the aestheticizing of the field (Martin Heidegger? Richard Rorty?), but many more would not. Henri Bergson argued that the relentless flow of time captures the essence of reality, and that, therefore, all concepts being static, distort reality. Proust channeled this conclusion into the literary techniques of In Search of Lost Time. But while we evaluate Bergson on the merits of his arguments, argumentative validity has no bearing on the accomplishment of Proust.

When it comes to philosophy’s progress, the inward-looking view of Wieseltier decrees that there is none: "The history of science is a history of errors corrected and discarded. But the vexations of philosophy and the obsessions of literature are not retired in this way. In these fields, the forward-looking cast backward glances." Literature and philosophy are crushed together in the hearty embrace. Plato would shudder.

Now for the naysayers. In the past, opposition to philosophy most often came from the pious, who protested the blasphemous arrogance of human reason seeking to supplant revelation. But nowadays the most vociferous of the naysayers are secular and scientific. While the yea-sayer sees philosophy as a species of literature, the naysayer sees philosophy as failed science. He urges us to look at the history of science and its triumphant expansions, which is simultaneously the history of the embarrassing shrinkage of philosophy. Yes, philosophy was the first academic field, but only because the sciences had not yet developed. Questions of physics, cosmology, biology, psychology, cognitive and affective neuroscience, linguistics, mathematical logic: Philosophy once claimed them all. But as the methodologies of those other disciplines progressed—being empirical, in the case of all but logic—questions over which philosophy had futilely sputtered and speculated were converted into testable hypotheses, and philosophy was rendered forevermore irrelevant.

Is there any doubt, demand the naysayers, about the terminus of this continuing process? Given enough time, talent, and funding, there will be nothing left for philosophers to consider. To quote one naysayer, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, "Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then ‘natural philosophy’ became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there’s a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves." Krauss tends to merge philosophy not with literature, as Wieseltier does, but rather with theology, since both, by his lights, are futile attempts to describe the nature of reality. One could imagine such a naysayer conceding that philosophers should be credited with laying the intellectual eggs, so to speak, in the form of questions, and sitting on them to keep them warm. But no life, in the form of discoveries, ever hatches until science takes over.

There’s some truth in the naysayer’s story. As far as our knowledge of the nature of physical reality is concerned—four-dimensional space-time and genes and neurons and neurotransmitters and the Higgs boson and quantum fields and black holes and maybe even the multiverse—it’s science that has racked up the results. Science is the ingenious practice of prodding reality into answering us back when we’re getting it wrong (although that itself is a heady philosophical claim, substantiated by concerted philosophical work).

And, of course, we have a marked tendency to get reality wrong. If you think of the kind of problems our brains evolved to solve in the Pleistocene epoch, it’s a wonder we’ve managed to figure out a technique to get so much right, one that is capable of getting reality itself to debunk some of our deepest intuitions about it—for example, relativity theory playing havoc with our ideas of space and time and quantum mechanics playing similarly with our notions of causality. In contrast, philosophical arguments, lacking that important pushback from the world, don’t have a comparable track record in establishing what Hume called matters of fact and existence.

The naysayer’s view of philosophy as failed or immature science denies it the possibility of progress, as does the yea-sayer’s view of philosophy as a species of literature. But neither conforms to what philosophy is really about, which is to render our human points of view ever more coherent. It’s in terms of our increased coherence that the measure of progress has to be taken, not in terms suitable for evaluating science or literature. We lead conceptually compartmentalized lives, our points of view balkanized so that we can live happily with our internal tensions and contradictions, many of the borders fortified by unexamined presumptions. It’s the job of philosophy to undermine that happiness, and it’s been at it ever since the Athenians showed their gratitude to Socrates for services rendered by offering him a cupful of hemlock.

One troubled conceptual border to which philosophers attend concerns science itself. In his essay "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars agrees that the proper agenda of philosophy lies in mediating among simultaneously held points of view with the aim of integrating them into a coherent whole. But for Sellars the action is focused on the border between what he calls the "scientific image" of us-in-the-world and the "manifest image" of us-in-the-world. (His actual language is "man-in-the-world." Sellars’s paper was published in 1962, based on two talks he gave in 1960. Certain incoherencies in points of view, reflected in linguistic standards, were yet to come to light.)

"For the philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision." The "manifest image" Sellars explained as the conceptual framework "in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world. It is the framework in terms of which, to use an existentialist turn of phrase, man first encountered himself—which is, of course, when he came to be man. For it is no merely incidental feature of man that he has a conception of himself as man-in-the-world, just as it is obvious, on reflection, that if man had a radically different conception of himself, he would be a radically different kind of man."

In other words, the manifest image is so central to the way in which we think of ourselves that it is constitutive of those very selves. We wouldn’t be the things that we are without it—the very things who progressively elaborate the scientific image, bringing to the task our manifest image of ourselves as rational beings, "able to measure ... [our] thoughts by standards of correctness, of relevance, of evidence." Our having an ever-expanding scientific image of ourselves is itself an aspect of our manifest image, the sense that we have of ourselves as creatures who not only believe but offer reasons for our beliefs (and for our actions as well, but we’ll get to that). We can’t give up on either of the two images of us-in-the-world without destroying the other. They are codependent even when there are issues between them—which is beginning to make philosophy sound like a couples therapist.

Consider, for example, that relativity theory seems to tell us that time doesn’t flow, that all of space-time is laid out in a frozen all-at-once-ness, with the distinctions among past, present, and future "an illusion," in the words of Einstein, "albeit a persistent one." How can such a view of time be reconciled with perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of our manifest image, implicated in almost every emotion we have—our regret and nostalgia for the past, our hopes and terrors for the future? One can’t revamp our notion of physical time without disturbing our conception of the very things we are.

And there is the scientific image of us-in-the-world elaborated by neuroscience, one in which I am a brain consisting of a hundred-billion neurons, connected by a hundred-trillion synapses, and this brain itself hasn’t a clue as to what’s going on among those synapses. How can this be reconciled with the manifest image of me as me, pursuing my life, remembering it and planning for it, singularly committed to its persistence and flourishing? How can the neuron-level view be reconciled with the manifest truth that at some level our brains undeniably think about things? Where’s the aboutness to be found among those neurons and synapses? And is the scientific image even coherent if we can’t assert that we think about that scientific image, and that in thinking about it, we are thinking about the world?

Once again we come up against the codependence of the scientific and manifest images, even as they sit on the couch with arms folded self-protectively across their chests and resentful ungivingness in their glares, while philosophy, charged with bringing them together, recognizes their mutual needs. As science progresses, philosophy’s work of increasing our overall coherence progresses in tandem. In fact, the scientific image couldn’t even coherently claim for itself its expansionist triumphs without helping itself to philosophers’ work—to explicate what is essential to scientific methodology and why it is uniquely effective, to argue why it offers an image of reality and not just one more social construction.

Sellars is right that philosophy is best viewed neither as inward-expressing literature (in which case give me poetry over philosophy) nor as failed science (in which case give me physics over philosophy), but as the systematic attempt to increase our overall coherence. Still, his conception is too narrow. Philosophy does indeed always involve our manifest image, but it needn’t always involve the scientific image. In particular, some of philosophy’s most significant progress has proceeded independently of science, and here the work of increasing our moral coherence is particularly important. And this is philosophical work that hasn’t kept itself locked away in the Academy, which was where Plato chose to pursue philosophy, but has made itself felt in the agora, where a barefoot Socrates wandered among his fellow citizens, trying to get them to feel the point of his questions so that they might begin to make moral progress.

As living organisms we are primed, unthinkingly, to do all we can to thrive; to be more precise, we are primed, unthinkingly, to do all we can to increase the probability that copies of our genes will survive. But our manifest image of us-in-the-world compels us to give reasons for our actions, and this activity, though undoubtedly compromised by the unthinking processes that science has recently brought to light, proceeds on its own terms. Indeed, the fact that it proceeds on its own terms is part of the manifest image of us-in-the-world. The reasons we are prepared to give to ourselves and one another in accounting for our behavior make no mention of the machinations of the selfish gene. Such reasons would never wash, not even if you’re Richard Dawkins. On the contrary, coherence work of the moral kind pushes in the direction of less influence by those unthinking processes and the presumptions they spawn—all variations on "me and my kind are worth more than you and your kind."

Gregarious creatures that we are, our framework of making ourselves coherent to ourselves commits us to making ourselves coherent to others. Having reasons means being prepared to share them—though not necessarily with everyone. The progress in our moral reasoning has worked to widen both the kinds of reasons we offer and the group to whom we offer them. There can’t be a widening of the reasons we give in justifying our actions without a corresponding widening of the audience to which we’re prepared to give our reasons. Plato gave arguments for why Greeks, under the pressures of war, couldn’t treat other Greeks in abominable ways, pillaging and razing their cities and taking the vanquished as slaves. But his reasons didn’t, in principle, generalize to non-Greeks, which is tantamount to denying that non-Greeks were owed any reasons. Every increase in our moral coherence—recognizing the rights of the enslaved, the colonialized, the impoverished, the imprisoned, women, children, LGBTs, the handicapped ...—is simultaneously an expansion of those to whom we are prepared to offer reasons accounting for our behavior. The reasons by which we make our behavior coherent to ourselves changes together with our view of who has reasons coming to them.

And this is progress, progress in increasing our coherence, which is philosophy’s special domain. In the case of manumission, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, criminals’ rights, animal rights, the abolition of cruel and unusual punishment, the conduct of war—in fact, almost every progressive movement one can name—it was reasoned argument that first laid out the incoherence, demonstrating that the same logic underlying reasons to which we were already committed applied in a wider context. The project of rendering ourselves less inconsistent, initiated by the ancient Greeks, has left those ancient Greeks, even the best and brightest of them, far behind, just as our science has left their scientists far behind.

This kind of progress, unlike scientific progress, tends to erase its own tracks as it is integrated into our manifest image and so becomes subsumed in the framework by which we conceive of ourselves. We no longer see the argumentative work it took for this advance in morality to be achieved. Its invisibility takes the measure of the achievement.

I’ve imagined Plato shuddering at a certain conception of the field he helped to shape. Would he likewise shudder at having been left so far behind by that field? I think not. If he was committed to any philosophical position, he was committed to the assertion that philosophy is progress-making. Think of the Myth of the Cave, which could be subtitled "A Philosophical Pilgrim’s Progress." Even excluding the science-directed philosophy of Sellars’s analysis, which couldn’t be accomplished in advance of scientific progress, still the task of rendering us more coherently integrated was too much for any man, for any generation, for any millennium. Our conceptual schemes are fragmented for reasons that run deep in our psyches, having nothing to do with the reasons that function in our manifest image of us-in-the-world, powered instead by unthinking strategies (strategies that science is beginning to illuminate).

No wonder progress, though real, is laborious. But given enough time and talent—and maybe even a bit of funding—our descendants will look back at us and wonder why we stopped short of the greater coherence they will have achieved.

Just about 20 years ago, I abandoned a career as a physical chemist to become a philosopher of science. For most of those 20 years, people (especially scientists) have been asking me what the heck the philosophy of science is, and whether scientists have any need of it.

There are lots of things philosophers of science study, but one central set of concerns is what is distinctive about science — how science differs from other human activities, what grounds its body of knowledge, what features are essential to scientific engagement with phenomena, etc. This means philosophers of science have spent a good bit of time trying to find the line between science and non-science, trying to figure out the logic with which scientific claims are grounded, working to understand the relation between theory and empirical data, and working out the common thread that unites many disparate scientific fields — assuming such a common thread exists.

If you like, you can think of this set of philosophical projects as trying to give an account of what science is trying to do — how science attempts to construct a picture of the world that is accountable to the world in a particular way, how that picture of the world develops and changes in response to further empirical information (among other factors), and what kind of explanations can be given for the success of scientific accounts (insofar as they have been successful). Frequently, the philosopher is concerned with “Science” rather than a particular field of science. As well, some philosophers are more concerned with an idealized picture of science as an optimally rational knowledge building activity — something they will emphasize is quite different from science as actually practiced.

Practicing scientists pretty much want to know how to attack questions in their particular field of science. If your goal is to understand the digestive system of some exotic bug, you may have no use at all for a subtle account of scientific theory change, let alone for a firm stand on the question of scientific anti-realism. You have much more use for information about how to catch the bug, how to get to its digestive system, what sorts of things you could observe measure or manipulate that could give you useful information about its digestive system, how to collect good data, how to tell when you’ve collected enough data to draw useful conclusions, appropriate methods for processing the data and drawing conclusions, and so forth.

A philosophy of science course doesn’t hand the entomologist any of those practical tools for studying the scientific problems around the bug’s digestive system. But philosophy of science is aimed at answering different questions than the working scientist is trying to answer. The goal of philosophy of science is not to answer scientific questions, but to answer questions about science.

Does a working scientist need to have learned philosophy of science in order to get the scientific job done? Probably not. Neither does a scientist need to have studied Shakespeare or history to be a good scientist — but these still might be worthwhile endeavors for the scientist as a person. Every now and then it’s nice to be able to think about something besides your day job. (Recreational thinking can be fun!)

Now, there are some folks who will argue that studying philosophy of science could be detrimental to the practicing scientist. Reading Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions with its claim that shifts in scientific paradigm have an inescapable subjective component, or even Popper’s view of the scientific method that’s meant to get around the problem of induction, might blow the young scientist’s mind and convince him that the goal of objective knowledge is unattainable. This would probably undermine his efforts to build objective knowledge in the lab.

(However, I’d argue that reading Helen Longino’s account of how we build objective knowledge — another philosophical account — might answer some of the worries raised by Popper, Kuhn, and that crowd, making the young scientist’s knowledge-building endeavors seem more promising.)

My graduate advisor in chemistry had a little story he told that was supposed to illustrate the dangers for scientists of falling in with the philosophers and historians and sociologists of science: A centipede is doing a beautiful and complicated dance. An ant walks up to the centipede and says, “That dance is lovely! How do you coordinate all your feet so perfectly to do it?” The centipede pauses to think about this and eventually replies, “I don’t know.” Then the centipede watches his feet and tries to do the dance again — and can’t!

The centipede could do the dance without knowing precisely how each foot was supposed to move relative to the others. A scientist can do science while taking the methodology of her field for granted. But having to give a philosophical account of or a justification for that methodology deeper than “this is what we do and it works pretty well for the problems we want to solve” may render that methodology strange looking and hard to keep using.

Then again, I’m told what Einstein did for physics had as much to do with proposing a (philosophical) reorganization of the theoretical territory as it did with new empirical data. So perhaps the odd scientist can put some philosophical training to good scientific use.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

"Papyrus Referring to Jesus’ Wife Is More Likely Ancient Than Fake, Scientists Say"

by

Laurie Goodstein

April 10th, 2014

The New York Times

A faded fragment of papyrus known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” which caused an uproar when unveiled by a Harvard Divinity School historian in 2012, has been tested by scientists who conclude in a journal published on Thursday that the ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery.

Skepticism about the tiny scrap of papyrus has been fierce because it contained a phrase never before seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ” Too convenient for some, it also contained the words “she will be able to be my disciple,” a clause that inflamed the debate in some churches over whether women should be allowed to be priests.

The papyrus fragment has now been analyzed by professors of electrical engineering, chemistry and biology at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries. (Scientists at the University of Arizona, who dated the fragment to centuries before the birth of Jesus, concluded that their results were unreliable.)

The test results do not prove that Jesus had a wife or disciples who were women, only that the fragment is more likely a snippet from an ancient manuscript than a fake, the scholars agree. Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School who gave the papyrus its name and fame, has said all along that it should not be regarded as evidence that Jesus married, only that early Christians were actively discussing celibacy, sex, marriage and discipleship.

“I took very seriously the comments of such a wide range of people that it might be a forgery,” Dr. King said in an interview this week. She said she is now very confident it is genuine.

“When you have all the evidence pointing in one direction, it doesn’t make it 100 percent, but history is not a place where 100 percent is a common thing,” Dr. King said.

The new information may not convince those scholars and bloggers who say the text is the work of a rather sloppy forger keen to influence contemporary debates. The Harvard Theological Review, which is publishing Dr. King’s long-delayed, peer-reviewed paper online on Thursday, is also publishing a rebuttal by Leo Depuydt, a professor of Egyptology at Brown University, who declares the fragment so patently fake that it “seems ripe for a Monty Python sketch.”

Dr. King presented the fragment with fanfare at a conference in Rome in September 2012, but was besieged by criticism because the content was controversial, the lettering was suspiciously splotchy, the grammar was poor, its provenance was uncertain, its owner insisted on anonymity and its ink had not been tested.

An editorial in the Vatican’s newspaper also declared it a fake. New Testament scholars claimed the text referred to the “bride of Christ,” which is the church — an interpretation Dr. King said was entirely possible.

It is very unusual to test the ink and papyrus of a fragment so small — this one is 4 by 8 centimeters — because it can damage the item, papyrologists say. The authenticity and dates of other famous fragments were determined by paleographers examining the handwriting.

The “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus was analyzed at Columbia University using micro-Raman spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of the ink. James T. Yardley, a professor of electrical engineering, said in an interview that the carbon black ink on this fragment was “perfectly consistent with another 35 or 40 manuscripts that we’ve looked at,” that date from 400 B.C. to A.D. 700 or 800.

At M.I.T.’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering, Timothy M. Swager, a chemistry professor, and two students used infrared spectroscopy to determine whether the ink showed any variations or inconsistencies.

“The main thing was to see, did somebody doctor this up?” Dr. Swager said in an interview. “And there is absolutely no evidence for that. It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.”

However, Dr. Depuydt, the Egyptologist at Brown University, said that testing the fragment was irrelevant and that he saw “no need to inspect it.” He said he decided based on the first newspaper photograph that the fragment was forged because it contained “gross grammatical errors,” and each word in it matched writing in the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. “It couldn’t possibly be coincidence,” he said.

A forger could easily create carbon black ink by mixing candle soot and oil, he said: “An undergraduate student with one semester of Coptic can make a reed pen and start drawing lines.”But the scientists say that modern carbon black ink looks very different under their instruments. And Dr. King said that her “big disappointment” is that so far, the story of the fragment has focused on forgery, not on history.

Two months after the release of a divisive independent report about the University of Colorado's philosophy department, faculty members are meeting for a two-day retreat to talk about how to move forward.

The retreat, which began Friday on the Boulder campus, includes a discussion facilitated by C. Kristina Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois.

In late January, the university administration released an independent report that found sexual harassment, bullying and other unprofessional sexualized behaviors within the philosophy department.

Three investigators with the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women Site Visit Program authored the report, which led administrators to replace the chairman and suspend all graduate admissions into the department until at least 2015.

"The site visit report has brought up some areas for improvement, so now it's time to have the discussion on how exactly the faculty as a team and the department as a whole can achieve those goals," CU spokesman Ryan Huff said Friday.

The retreat follows the report's recommendation to ban alcohol at all department events, but sidesteps another recommendation that all official events be held during normal workday hours.

Near the end of the report, the authors described their concerns with a past "mountain event" retreat and plans for a future event.

"In light of this department's history, all events, including retreats, need to be held during business hours (9-5) and on campus or near campus in public venues," the report's authors wrote. "...Under no circumstances should this department (or any other) be organizing the social calendars of its members."

Off-site retreat

One half of the retreat will occur from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at the Hotel Boulderado, according to an email sent to faculty members.

Huff, who said the cost of the retreat wasn't readily available to him, said the report's recommendation does not apply to official department-wide events, such as the planned retreat this weekend.

He added that with the teaching schedules of faculty, it's difficult to get everyone together during the week for a two-day retreat.

"The report was focusing on unofficial, impromptu gatherings of small numbers of faculty and students," he said. "Those are the kinds of events that, especially with alcohol present, should not be taking place. However, the report is not focusing on the events that take place outside the 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday time frame that are official events with agendas with all the faculty present, with the department head present. That's what these events are."Though the College of Arts and Sciences is paying for the retreat, no administrators will be present. In an email to the faculty, department chairman Andy Cowell said Gunsalus will not produce any written materials from the retreat, but will "discuss things" with Steven Leigh, dean of the college, "since he's paying the bills on this one."

Leigh declined to comment.'A very strong department'

Since the report's release, Huff said many members of the department have attended bystander training and additional training about sexual harassment and discrimination. Huff said the department climate committee also has been meeting and discussing how to move forward after the site visit report's release.

"There certainly are various trainings either in progress or that will occur in the future to improve the climate and this retreat is really a chance to get everyone in one room and to really talk about how to improve the situation," Huff said.

Philosophy professor Michael Tooley said he's been optimistic about the department in recent weeks, adding that he expects some useful discussions to occur at the weekend retreat.

He said many faculty members have been meeting for lunch on a regular basis, which has helped to improve morale within the department.

Tooley also said several faculty members who had planned to leave the department are now being retained, and there's a possibility new faculty members may be added to philosophy in the future.

"I was really quite worried because a number of my colleagues applied for jobs elsewhere, so there was really a fear that we would lose people, but that hasn't happened," he said. "I think if we can get over that hurdle or two we'll continue to have a very strong department."

Big news today in the comics publishing world: Amazon has purchased Comixology, the largest retailer of digital comics. So what does that mean for your local comic book store?

Amazon is certainly already competing with brick and mortar comic book stores; they sell both physical comics (often with sizable discounts on trade paperbacks) and Kindle editions of comic books. But the Comixology purchase means that Amazon is looking to be the major player in digital comics distribution (especially when it comes to single issues of comics), and that digital comics may be seeing a much wider audience than they've enjoyed through Comixology and other platforms so far.

Comixology is already a significant concern for comics retailers. Some shops have opted to work with it, participating in the platform's storefront affiliate program, which enables retailers to sell digital comics from their brick and mortar stores. And, as publishers have increasingly made digital editions of their comics available the same day as the print comics, Comixology has seen growing financial success. Apple announced that the Comixology app for iPad and iPhone was the highest-grossing non-game app of 2013.

So what does Amazon's acquisition mean? For now, all Comixology CEO David Steinberger is just saying that Comixology will become an Amazon subsidiary and continue to operate as its own platform. But with Amazon behind Comixology, chances are that we'll be seeing digital comics getting into the hands of more and more people. Hopefully, that means more people reading comics overall—and more creators seeing their comics purchased and read even if they don't have a print distributor.

But as with prose books, not everyone is going to want to make the switch from paper to digital. Some people simply prefer the experience of reading on paper, and many folks collect single issues of comics—although it will be interesting to see if the latter changes with the rise of digital comics. And there's a social aspect to comic book stores that is distinct from what you see in a bookstore. The weekly ritual of going to the shop on Wednesdays to discuss the latest issue with your fellow readers won't be replicated by the mere availability of digital comics. Still, it will be interesting to see what Amazon plans to do in the digital comics space and how retailers feel about the purchase.

It will also be interesting if we see competitors in the digital comics space rise in the wake of this announcement. Comixology is the top digital comics platform; its major competitor, Graphicly, switched its focus to ebooks instead of digital comics alone. This purchase means that Amazon has essentially created a digital comics monopoly, but the field of comics is populated by creators who are incredibly sophisticated when it comes to the digital space. Many cartoonists have had immense success releasing their comics on PDF—often using Kickstarter as a preorder system—as well as through platforms like Comixology and Amazon. As Amazon moves more into the digital comics space, the reactions of those creators—whether they find Comixology/Amazon useful going forward—could have a major impact on the landscape.

"Amazon Buys Digital Comics Company ComiXology"

by

Graeme McMillan

April 19th, 2014

Wired

Well, there goes the digital neighborhood. ComiXology, the leading digital comics platform responsible for the sale of more than 4 billion pages of comics in 2013 alone, has been purchased by Amazon.

The buyout (which is expected to close in the second fiscal quarter of 2014) had been rumored for weeks now—ComiXology’s eleventh-hour sponsorship deal with the recent Emerald City Comic-Con being seen as “proof” by many—but official confirmation came in the form of an open letter on ComiXology’s site this afternoon in which co-founder and CEO David Steinberger wrote that the sale makes ComiXology’s “crazy goal” of turning everyone on the planet into a comic reader “more possible than ever before.”

“ComiXology will retain its identity as an Amazon subsidiary and we’re not anywhere near done ‘taking comics further,’” the letter continued. “We’ve only just begun.” In a separate statement, Amazon’s VP of content acquisition and independent publishing David Naggar said that the two companies “share a passion for reinventing reading in a digital world.”

Details about the deal were undisclosed, unsurprisingly, but the initial announcement left questions about the buyout that remain unanswered, including the fate of ComiXology’s self-publishing platform Submit and whether or not the purchase will impact ComiXology’s relationship with Apple.

There is undoubtedly the potential for this partnership to bring ComiXology (and comics in general) to a wider audience, but also the potential for the company to disappear within the wider Amazon hierarchy. Will ComiXology end up being the next IMDb, Audible.com or Zappos, or go the way of CDNow, Telebook or Yap?

[Note: An earlier version of this story asked whether or not the Amazon acquisition would impact ComiXology’s relationships with publishers. Representatives for both Marvel and DC told WIRED that there would be no change, with a DC Entertainment statement going on to say that the company was “confident that Amazon’s purchase of ComiXology will make both our partners that much stronger and allow us all to continue to enhance and build the fastest growing segment of our publishing business as we bring our digital comics and graphic novels to our fans all over the globe.”]

Poet colleague

Annus mirabilis-1905 March is a time of transition winter and spring commence their struggle between moments of ice and mud a robin appears heralding the inevitable life stumbling from its slumber it was in such a period of change in 1905 that the House of Physics would see its Newtonian axioms of an ordered universe collapse into a new frontier where the divisions of time and space matter and energy were to blend as rain and wind in a storm that broke loose within the mind of Albert Einstein where Brownian motion danced seen and unseen, a random walk that became his papers marching through science reshaping the very fabric of the universe we have come to know we all share a common ancestor a star long lost in the eons of memory and yet in that commonality nature demands a permutation a perchance genetic roll of the dice which births a new vision lifting us temporarily from the mystery exposing some of the roots to our existence only to raise a plethora of more questions as did the papers of Einstein in 1905